Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca,
survivor of an ill-fated attempt to conquer Florida and the southeast,
is shipwrecked on Galveston Island off the Texas coast and begins
his eight year odyssey as one of the first Europeans to set foot in
the West.

After living six years among the
Indians of the Texas coast, Cabeza de Vaca and his three fellow survivors
-- one an African slave named Esteban -- begin their travels across
Texas and the Southwest into northern Mexico, protected by Cabeza's
reputation as a healer and man of peace.

Cabeza de Vaca and his companions
meet a band of Spanish slave hunters near Culiacan on the Mexican
west coast and make their way to Mexico City, where their adventure
sparks interest in the mysterious lands to the north.

Fray Marcos de Niza, a Franciscan
friar, is sent to explore the lands to the north of Mexico, guided
by Esteban, the African who had accompanied Cabeza de Vaca. Within
a year, Marcos returns with news of a great city called Cibola, where
Esteban was killed, which from a distance appeared to him "bigger
than the city of Mexico."

Francisco
Vasquez de Coronado leads Mexico's invasion of the north with an expeditionary
force of 300 conquistadors and more than one thousand Indian "allies."
When they reach Cibola, they find not the promised metropolis but
"a little, crowded village, looking as if it had been crumpled
all up together." This is the Zuni Pueblo of Hawikuh, whose warriors
answer with arrows when Coronado demands that they swear loyalty to
his King. Within an hour, the Spaniards have overrun the pueblo, and
over the next few weeks, they conquer the other Zunis in the region.

Lopez de Cardenas, an officer in
Coronado's army, sets off to investigate Hopi reports of a great river
to the west of their lands. After a 20-day trek, Cardenas becomes
the first white man to see the Colorado River from the rim of the
Grand Canyon.

Hernando de Alvarado, another Coronado
officer, journies with a group of Cicuye Indians back to their homeland.
Along the way Alvarado see the ancient mesa-top pueblo of the Acoma,
and at Cicuye, on the Pecos River, he learns of wild "cattle"
on a nearby plain, like those described by Cabeza de Vaca. Guided
there by a Pawnee captive, whom he calls El Turco, Alvarado enters
west Texas and sees a vast herd of buffalo. At the same time, he learns
from El Turco of a place in the far north called Quivira, where there
is an abundance of gold.

Coronado moves his camp to the
upper Rio Grande, where his soldiers confiscate one pueblo for winter
quarters and loot the surrounding pueblos for supplies. During this
operation, a Spaniard rapes an Indian woman, and when Coronado refuses
to punish him, the Indians retaliate by stealing horses. Lopez de
Cardenas attacks the thieves' pueblo, captures 200 men and methodically
burns them all at the stake.

Faced with an incipient uprising,
Coronado orders an attack on Moho pueblo, a center of Indian resistance.
His men are repulsed when they try to scale the walls, so they settle
in for a seige that lasts from January through March. At last, when
the Moho try to slip away, the Spaniards kill more than 200 men, women
and children in a massacre that pacifies the region.

Coronado sets out in April to investigate
El Turco's tales of Quivira. Retracing Alvarado's path, he soon reaches
the Texas plains, where there are "so many cattle that it would
be impossible to estimate their number, since there was not a single
day...that I lost sight of them." He continues for a month, unaware
that El Turco is misleading him to the southeast in the hope that
he can exhaust the Spaniards and escape. When Coronado discovers the
deception, he turns north with 30 men, sending the rest back to their
camp on the Rio Grande.

Traveling by compass north across
the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, Coronado comes to the first Quivira
settlement on the Arkansas River in early July, discovering a cluster
of grass huts, not the opulent city El Turco had described. He continues
to explore the region for a month, ranging as far north as the Smoky
Hill River in central Kansas. Here torture forces El Turco to confess
that he has been deceiving the Spaniards from the outset, and he is
choked to death. In late August Coronado begins the long trek back
to his camp on the upper Rio Grande, where he spends the winter.

De Soto's expedition circles back
to the Mississippi, where De Soto himself dies. His troops then head
west again into east Texas, but after months of wandering they return
to the Mississippi and construct boats that carry them downriver into
the Gulf and, they hope, eventually to Mexico.

Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo is sent
on a naval expedition up the California coastline. He sails into San
Diego harbor, becoming the first European to enter California, though
he finds that the Indians there have already heard that "men
like us...bearded, clothed and armed...[are] killing many native Indians."
Cabrillo goes on to chart the harbors at San Pedro and Santa Barbara.
His expedition spends the winter on Santa Catalina Island, where Cabrillo
dies.

Under pressure from religious leaders,
especially the Dominican friar Bartolome de Las Casas, Emperor Carlos
V attempts to impose "New Laws" on the Spanish colonies,
ending the encomienda system that gives settlers the right to Indian
slave labor. In Mexico, the New Laws are denounced.

The Cabrillo expedition continues
under the command of chief pilot Bartoleme Ferrer, who discovers San
Francisco Bay and pushes on to the Rogue River, north of the present
border between California and Oregon, before turning back.

Bartolome de Las Casa, the first
priest ordained in the Western hemisphere and chief architect of the
now-defunct "New Laws" against Indian enslavement, publishes
Brief Relations of the Destruction of the Indies, which provides
many gruesome examples of the colonists' treatment of Indians.

Sir Francis Drake sails into a
small harbor north of San Francisco Bay to repair his ship, The
Golden Hind, after a year of marauding along the Mexican coast;
he claims the surrounding territory for Queen Elizabeth I and England.THE CREATION OF NEW MEXICO (1598-1607)

Don Juan Oñate leaves Chihuahua
to establish the colony of New Mexico, leading a multicultural band
of 500 settlers. Advancing up the Rio Grande, he establishes his headquarters
at a confiscated pueblo north of present-day Santa Fe, which he names
San Juan, creating the first permanent European settlement in the
American West.

Oñate
retaliates for an Acoma attack on his colony by sending a small force
against their nearly-impregnable mesa-top pueblo. Despite the tactical
and numerical odds, the Spaniards destroy Acoma, killing 800 men,
women and children, and taking more than 500 captive. To make the
Acoma living reminders of the need for obedience, Oñate condemns
all the male captives older than twenty-five to have one foot cut
off.

Oñate explores westward
through Arizona to the Gulf of California, searching for gold or silver
to capitalize his colony; he returns empty-handed, but stops at El
Morro, a massive rock formation near the Hawikuh Zuni pueblo, to add
his name to the hundreds of Indian writings already scrached into
the stone: "There passed by here the Adelantado Don Juan de Oñate,
from the discovery of the Sea of the South, the 16th of April of 1605."

Franciscan claims of success in
converting the Indians of New Mexico persuade Mexican officials to
maintain their colony there rather than abandon Christian souls to
damnation. Pedro de Peralta is named governor of the colony and establishes
Santa Fe as its new capital. For his Governor's Palace on the new
town plaza, he does not recreate the architecture of Spain but instead
adopts the style and materials of the pueblos.

Horses
stolen from the ranches of New Mexico begin to transform the culture
of the Plains, enabling Native Americans to hunt buffalo more efficiently
and to range farther in battle with their enemies. Within another
generation the horse will spread from New Mexico through the region
west of the Rocky Mountains to the tribes of the Northwest.